White over Black is a huge book,
encyclopedic in its coverage, and prescient in the kinds of questions it asked.
It loomed very large for me, especially as I was writing the dissertation
proposal. One of its great strengths is that it covers a great deal of
territory, both geographically and temporally. If Kenneth Stampp was the
historian who taught us how to think about slavery historically, then I think
Jordan fulfilled a similar function for scholars who are interested in
articulations of race and white supremacy. My main issue with Jordan is his
description of the English decision to adopt the wholesale enslavement of
Africans as an “unthinking decision.” The English did that deliberately, with
malice aforethought.

5) A HUGE takeaway point of your book is
how religion was vital to

creating "race" as a category.
If you will, explain briefly how you

go about casting that argument in your
book, and perhaps one or two

of the most important pieces of evidence
that influenced you in

coming to this conclusion.

I think if I had to boil the book down
to one major question, it would be: how did Anglo-Virginians come to understand
black and Christian to be irreconcilable terms? I wanted to discover and trace
the process by which that happened. I had all of Hening’s Statutes, of course,
but these laws were effectively divorced from their social context. They
indicated a context but I needed another way to get at what real people were
doing, and maybe what they were thinking as well. That’s where the court
records came in. Seventeenth-century Virginia court records are wonderful and
rich; the voices of actual people, and often people who were silenced in other
contexts, come out. I found the voices of indentured servants, male and female,
of poor planters, of slaves, and even occasionally of Indians, in addition to
the voices of the Anglo-Virginian elite. So I had the material that would tell
me what people did, and maybe what they thought, but would it help me show how
Christianity created race? I wasn’t sure until I started digging into the
microfilm at the LIbrary of Virginia (and learning that dreadful
seventeenth-century court hand). Then I started to find court cases in which
Christianity and race were both implicated, usually revolving around some
aspect of Christian ritual or practice. Baptism stuck out in particular for me.
Every time I turned around, someone in Virginia was suing for his freedom on
the basis of his baptism. I found these cases to be enormously powerful,
especially since the Virginia legislature passed a law in 1667 essentially
saying that baptized slaves could not become free. And then I started to see
the narrative arc of baptism, Christianity, slavery, and freedom over the long
seventeenth century. And I started to see how race was embedded implicitly in
the way elite Virginians talked about baptism and in the ways they talked about
converting their enslaved property. And then I realized that the book was going
to work.

Baptism was just one theme that
suggested itself to me as I worked through the primary sources. As many people
will already be aware, many seventeenth-century records had to do with sex and
marriage. Religious and race were implicated in fornication as well, and again
I began to flesh out the social context of Hening’s Statutes. I
especially love the words of the young indentured servant Elizabeth Lang, who
had had an illegitimate child with an Indian man named Oni Kitt in 1671/72. In
court, the record said, she “humbly desireth that the Indian may not have the
bringing up of my child, nor anything to do with it...a Pagan may not have my
child.” Lang’s words are so powerful...”a Pagan.” Those were the kinds of
documents that help me situate religion and race together.

I wanted to structure the book so that
readers could clearly see the historical change I was describing. So the first
two chapters gave context and defined the notion of “potential
Christianity”--the English belief that Indians (and also perhaps Africans)
could become Christian. The second chapter also showed how the idea of potential
Christianity began to break down. The next three chapters show how the English
defined “hereditary heathenism” over the course of the long seventeenth
century. “Faith in the Blood” discusses sex, marriage, fornication, and the
idea that Christianity was a heritable trait. “Baptism and the Birth of Race”
looks at how the English used the ritual of baptism to create race. And
“Becoming Christian, Becoming White” examines the definition of whiteness
strongly linked with Christianity through the lens of personal and communal
violence. In the last chapter I really struggled with what to say about the
eighteenth century. In many ways, it was more of the same, but I wanted to say
more about how planters abandoned the idea of that their enslaved property
could not become Christian. The idea of hereditary heathenism lost some of its
vigor, but race as an ideology remained strong, mostly because planters were
able to take advantage of other ways and means of defining race. I also wanted,
in that chapter, to say something meaningful about how enslaved Africans and
native people resisted racial definition by the planter elite. That was a real
struggle for me; the sources are so few and far between. I hope I managed to
get that point across. Christianity, while a site for racial definition, was
also a tool for resistance.

My favorite source has to be the story
of Goody Hinman. In 1646 someone started the rumor that Sarah Hinman “had layen
with an Indian.” The evidence was a long poem (a very bad one I might add)
about a wild boar breaking a small pot: “The boare did strike it with his Tush
[tusk]/but did not enter farr.” The wild boar is a metaphor for an Indian man,
and the pot is a metaphor for an English woman. (The gendered aspects are
really quite striking, aren’t they?) It’s a ridiculous story and an equally
ridiculous poem, but the underlying scandal of a married English woman sleeping
with an Indian man enveloped the entire county for several months. Goody Hinman
herself refused to get out of bed, saying she was “barbarously Scandalized
& defamed [her]...by sayeinge that she defyled her body with a pagan.” See?
Great stuff.

6) You deal with white religious
attitudes and laws about both

Africans (and Afro-Virginians) and
Indians. How much did whites

categorize/subjugate both equally in
their thinking? Were Africans

and Indians, in other words, both placed
in a similar category of

racial inferiority, or were there
differences in the categories

created by and employed by whites?

This is a really good question, and it
gets to the heart of a major difference between the English imperial world and
the Spanish and French New World empires. In New Spain and New France, there
were many racial categories. I’m thinking now of the famous casta paintings
from Spanish America, some of which details scores of different racial
combinations to denote the offspring of Europeans and Indians, Africans and
Indians, Europeans and Africans, etc. The catchall term for people of mixed
heritage is “mestizo” in Spanish, “metis” in French, and “mulatto” in English.
Though the English had a word for such people, they were far less interested in
tracing out all these variations. By the eighteenth century in the English
Atlantic, you were either black or white, and that was it. Of course initially
there were legal differences between Tidewater Indians and enslaved Africans.
Indians had a few privileges (including the right not to be enslaved). English
charters also cautioned colonists to be kind and fair with native people, a
level of politeness that Africans never received. But what the laws and the
charters said, and what English people did, were two very different things. In
practice, the English put Indians and Africans in quite similar racial
categories, which is why by the early eighteenth century it is difficult to
tell the difference between enslaved Indians and enslaved Africans on Virginia
plantations.

Comments

This is great. When I taught the survey last year, I spent a couple of days discussing the construction of race in colonial Virginia. I tried to include some discussion of religion, but didn't have the understanding to properly articulate its role in that process. It sounds like your book is exactly what I need to make sense of that. Thanks!

Thanks for these very helpful interviews. I've already asked UofC's Regenstein to order the book. I've always found quite fascinating and helpful Jordan's discussion of heathenism in his early section, "First Impressions." I wonder, Rebecca, if you extend or complicate his claim that heathenism was "an inherent characteristic of savage" persons and his later attempt (in the "souls of men" section) to tease out what it meant for the English to publicly raise doubts about whether Africans could in fact convert to Christianity (in part because of incipient derogatory assessments of mental capacity)? It seems to me this is quite crucial to any discussion of the English considering blacks as "hereditary heathens." Perhaps these issues are covered in your book and this is not the place to ask them, but I know of few books that explore these issues in the way that Jordan does and that's one of the reasons why I always revisit his arguments when I'm teaching my class on Christianity and Slavery in the US. This interview has certainly whetted my appetite to read your book!

Curtis, I guess you could say I complicate Jordan's formulation of this problem. I begin by saying that though the English recognized that Indians were not Christian, the English thought of Indians as "potential Christians." That is, they thought Indians could become Christians just like them. The transformation to hereditary heathenism--the idea that heathenism was innate--took awhile to implement. This is one of the weaknesses of Jordan's book: encyclopedic though it is, it only spends a few pages on the seventeenth century (about forty, I think). I hope that answers your question!

(Just got into my office this morning and had a look at White over Black. It's more like 90 pages on the seventeenth century, but I think the point still stands--Jordan was just more interested in the eighteenth century. Which is OK, but it allowed him to set up the "unthinking decision" that I find so unconvincing.)